Quotes from Joyce Maynard

Those times a person feels most afraid for their life? Those are the times you know you're alive.

Not all at once, but gradually, over the months, another revelation came to me: None of that other stuff, much as I'd loved it, was what made a marriage. Not restaurant dinners or romantic vacations. Not walks on the beach or visits to wine country in the Boxster. Not oysters and martinis or moonlight over the Bay Bridge." "This was a marriage. As uncomfortable and inconvenient and devastating as it might be to live as we did now, we inhabited this place together.

Every night, as we sat down together at the table, I still took Jim's hand and closed my eyes before we lifted our forks, our silent prayer." "There was no need to ask what we prayed for, though I would add three words to the end of it." "Remember this moment.

They seemed to arrive at some form of friendship. Maybe they were like a couple of weary soldiers who went through a war together, side by side in the trenches, and having no inclination to relive the old battles found a certain comfort in the simple knowledge that they'd been young together and present at the same terrible moments of bloodshed. Even though, in their case the injury sustained there was my mother's t the hands of my father.

Some family's boat capsized at Lake Winnipesaukee the day before and now they were looking for the father's body.

It seems the myth survives in our culture still, that a young girl's worth, measured against that of a great man, may be of lesser consequence… I would say rather that a man who treats those offering up their love and trust as expendable is lesser himself for having done so. There is art, and there are artists. Let's not confuse the two.

the idea of having for one's partner a person whose presence in the room transformed it for you—someone who felt that way about you—seemed the only thing worth pursuing. If you couldn't have that, you'd do better on your own. Before

He himself did not eat. I had been hungry, but sitting there now, at the table with the two of them, it felt as crude to chew or swallow as it would have to munch on popcorn at a baby's christening, or lick an ice-cream cone while your friend told you his dog died. I shouldn't be here was how I felt.

Ihre Schuhe - ihre Tanzschuhe - lagen unter dem Tisch, und ihre Haare wirkten feucht - vielleicht von Tanzen, vielleicht aber auch vom Leben.

I love him," Patty said. "But our dad is a loser.

Carla always says, "I don't like risks." In Greg's opinion, there's no way to avoid them. It's just a matter of whether you choose dangerous action or dangerous inaction.

She never gave up adoring our father, but he ceased to be, for her, the larger-than-life hero I continued to make him into. For Patty, he was more like a deeply lovable spaniel who keeps peeing on the rug and chewing on the upholstery, no matter how many times you tell him not to.

your eyes will be drawn to one small odd thing among all the thousands of others—the thing that calls to you, and suddenly, out of everything else your eyes are taking in and disregarding, they'll focus on this one spot where something doesn't make sense, or maybe it spells danger, or it just reminds you of a time and place different from this one. And you can't look away.

Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.

Children had to know pain or how would they ever know what to do when they encountered it. Trouble would come no matter what. The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble found them, as it would, they'd be able to survive it. Teach your children well.

missing a crucial layer of skin other people had that allowed them to get through the day when he could not.

Raising three human beings who will go out and change the world.

The older you get, the more bad things happen," he said. "Good ones, too. People you care about start dying. There's no getting around it.

Age is not ugly, just poignant.

Drama: an addiction of mine, maybe. To look at my history, at least, you would have had to consider that possibility.)

Those fourteen months had shaken me to my core, to the point where I no longer knew anything for sure except that parents should not look to their children to meet their needs. You don't adopt a child because you need more love in your life. You had better have the love part figured out already.

Not until we learned of his illness, and we walked the path of that terrible struggle together, did I understand what it meant to be a couple - to be a true partner and to have one. I learned the full meaning of marriage only as mine was drawing to a close. I discovered what love was as mine departed the world. This is our story.

But it has been my way—as a woman, but also as a writer—to speak of the kinds of human experience so many of us are taught to believe we should keep hidden. I am speaking here of those so-called "shameful" emotions like envy, anger, self-pity, vanity, pride—the moments I believe all of us experience in which we display our least heroic but possibly most human selves. Over my many years as a writer, I

This was the terrible part of being a parent. The more you loved, the more you had to lose. It might as well be your own heart the pitcher was firing off toward the plate, hovering out in midair, ready for some bat to smash into it. Once you had a child you were never safe again.